Broadcast television is a constantly changing medium with linear programming schedules. Multiple forms of recording devices exist to satisfy a consumer's need to record selected programming at their own convenience, but these require consumers to know in advance what programming they want to record. Programming that has not been recorded cannot be viewed later.
Broadcast television is localized by satellite, cable, or antenna coverage. Even though content partnership between networks is common, the delivery is still regional.
Internet Protocol television (IPTV) 202 solutions are emerging to deliver content ‘on demand’ by exploiting the internet as a global delivery medium, but the large cost of bandwidth and streaming services for long form content delivery, coupled with licensing costs and restrictions, hampers wide scale distribution.
There is also an infrastructure and development cost to create such a delivery platform. These costs mean that a company must have either large-scale user numbers, or premium content must be introduced to attract this audience and achieve a viable income.
User generated content sites such as YouTube have begun to attract the attention of content producers as a medium for delivery, in particular, time-sensitive content such as news broadcasts. These sites go some way to providing content to the user in a timely manner, but indexing is driven by manually generated program titles, descriptions, tags, and other processes that cause delays. For news information in particular, the absence of video content within a search engine's ‘real-time results,’ is an indication of a problem in this process—in particular when the story has already been aired, but a user must wait for someone else to manually add a news story in order for them to watch it later.
Video advertising remains largely rooted in its broadcast television foundations. Advertising is based largely on broad channel or program demographics rather than explicit information about a program's content. On the internet, text-based advertising such as Google Adwords, has proven to have much more value with context-sensitive advertising.
While the increasing use of mobile devices delivers an emerging base of consumers, traditional long-play program formats are poorly suited to these users and their devices. Several formats have been defined and deployed for delivery of television streams to mobile devices. These formats, such as Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld or DVB-H, are focused on replicating the television experience on a mobile device but do not address the more common use cases for mobile devices, which favor short-form content.